With the explosion of wireless phone access and usage, cellular phone service is fast becoming more and more available in developing countries where landline infrastructures are generally considered insufficient. Consequently, mobile service providers or operators are finding captive consumers in these countries for mobile phone services, particularly pre-paid phone cards.
The following prior art patent represent the state of the art for the transfer of digital data to a mobile device, and is hereby incorporated by reference:
U.S. Pat. No. 6,714,797 to Rautila discloses a system, method and computer program for ordering, paying for and downloading digital products to a mobile device. The mobile device accesses electronic shop server web sites that contain digital products for sale and hotspot network locations where these digital products may be downloaded to the mobile device via the short range transceiver located in the mobile device. Using the system, method and computer program disclosed therein, a user of a mobile device may download large amounts of digital data without incurring telephone or cellular phone charges.
However, a problem with the above-mentioned prior art system is its inflexibility. From the mobile operator's perspective, for example, such existing cellular pre-payment applications do not allow for the delivery of digital content to pre-pay mobile phone subscribers, so prevalent and growing in developing countries. Such current implementations of pre-payment systems lack flexibility, ease of implementation and responsiveness.